Helen Fabela Chávez edit
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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because…
I would love some feed back on this article I have been working on. If anyone has any constructive criticism which would make the article better (linguistic, grammatical, informational etc.) would be appreciated. If anyone knows of any other sources or could possibly help me post a photo I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you in advance, F ventouris (talk) 23:35, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
Brianboulton comments: My guess is that you are a fairly new editor and this may be your first attempt to create an article. I found it informative, but at the same time, the prose is very rough in places. There are also Manual of Style issues; I'm not sure how familiar you are with WP:MOS. I have gone through the first couple of sections line by line, and identified numerous prose fixes that are required. I suggest you work on these, and then have a try at redrafting the later sections; I'd be willing to look at the article later, when these things are done.
- General points
- The article is seriously under-referenced, with many statements lacking citations, Such references that you have are not properly formatted; please study WP:CITE to see what is required here.
- As to getting a photograph, all published photographs of Helen Chavez will be under copyright. Someone who has taken a photgraph of her may post it and licence it for publication here. Or you may seek permission from a copyright holder to use an image, but it is unlikely that you will get it.
- Lead
- Lead is too short, and needs to be expanded into a summary of the whole article (per WP:LEAD), rather that a brief introductory statement.
- Give full date of birth, not just year, in the opening line.
- Early life
- Many readers (especially non-Americans) won't know about the Mexican revolution. Rather than requiring that they use the link, could you include dates for the revolution in the text?
- Pronoun issues: "Both worked as migrant laborers, first in the Imperial Valley and later in the San Joaquín Valley and thus exposed her to the hardships of labor at an early age". You need to identify "her", and "She" in the next sentence.
- Informal language: "she quit high school" - better say "left"
- Remove semicolon after "family", and replace "consisting of" with "which consisted of"
- Married life
- Remove capital in heading ("life") This applies to all the section headings. Thus: "Union Organizing", "Dual commitments", "Later involvements".
- "Soon after the Cesar's WW II service ended.." Surely not "the" Cesar? Also, "WW II" should be spelled out: "World War II"
- As a matter of WP convention, once past her childhood the subject of the article should generally be referred to as "Chavez" (or "Helen Chavez" if there is possible confusion with Cesar. She should not be referred to as "Helen"
- Quotations should be attributed as well as cited. Use ndashes rather than hyphens in the text.
- "The couple was wed" → "The couple were married"
- "Then the two returned to San Jose, California for a church wedding": why does this information require a quotation?
- "They retreated to a two week honeymoon.." Wrong word - better to say "departed for". And "two-week" requires a hyphen
- The general WP convention is that values below 10 are written, 10 and above are given numerically. You don't have to follow this provided you are consistent, but at present you have "19 years old" and "twenty years old" on successive lines.
- "at the time of their union" → "at the time of her marriage"
- The information about the growth of the family over a ten-year period needs to be presented min a more encyclopedic fashion. We don't need the names, nor the number of grandchildren, nor the information about favorite meals and birthdays. I would suggest a brief extension to the previous sentence: "The newlyweds settled permanently in Delano, California, where in the following ten years eight children had been born".
As I say, I haven't read through the later sections, but I think some of the problems I've identified will recur there. As I am not able to watch individual peer reviews (too many), perhaps you would contact my talk page when you are ready for me to look at the article again. Brianboulton (talk) 17:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)